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Stream: Justin Bieber, “Bad Day”

Justin "brothel in Brazil" Bieber continues his #MusicMondays series with "Bad Day," an acoustic flip of Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day," itself a flip of the Isley Brothers' "Footsteps in the Dark." Five weeks in, now feels like a good time to ask why more artists don't release music this way: one to-be-talked-about song at a time, immediately available for sale and as a monetized YouTube stream. Do over-entertained audiences really want to focus on more than one song at a time? By December, Bieber will have basically soft-launched a career direction-nudging album, skirting formal reviews but collecting data on which ideas did best and pocketing profits along the way.